Jeff Koons is an American artist, born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955, who turns balloon animals, flowering puppies and an inflatable rabbit into giant, mirror-polished sculptures.
He is famous for Balloon Dog and for a price: in 2019 his stainless steel Rabbit sold for 91.1 million dollars, a record for a living artist. Critics call his work kitsch, and courts in two countries have ruled that he copied.
Rabbit began as a vinyl toy, the kind that can deflate at any moment. In 1986 Koons had it cast in stainless steel, and the steel version does not sag and does not smile. Its head is a mirror, so whoever looks at it finds their own face there.
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On 15 May 2019, Rabbit went up at Christie's in New York with an estimate of 50 to 70 million dollars. The hammer fell at 80 million, which is 91.1 million with fees. The art dealer Robert Mnuchin bought it by bidding on the floor for a client. The sellers were the family of the publisher Si Newhouse.
The price took back a title. Koons had held the record for a living artist with Balloon Dog (Orange), sold for 58.4 million dollars in 2013, until David Hockney's Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) reached 90.3 million in November 2018. Rabbit passed it by less than a million.
The same artist had already sat on the other side of the courtroom. For Banality, the series that made him famous in 1988, he found a photograph called Puppies on a postcard, removed its copyright label and sent it to his assistants with a note: work must be just like photo. He sold three copies of the sculpture for 367,000 dollars.
The photographer, Art Rogers, sued. In 1992 a federal appeals court ruled against Koons.
What You'll Discover
What he did before the art.
Whose pictures French judges say he copied.
How a scandal led to a dog.
What the mirror is for.
Whose hands actually make it.
Why Paris did not want his gift.